A corn-y answer

Last summer I posted a blog about our trip out west, and because I was living out of a suitcase for several weeks, took a shortcut and grabbed a photo of a corn field off the Internet.

Over the last several months I’ve noticed a flush of hits on my blog from people seeking out “corn field” or “pictures of corn” and sure enough, when I do a Google image search, my blog’s the second one.

So I got a little antsy about the photo, as it clearly belongs to someone else, and was just on the Web. I set out to track down the photographer, just to make sure it was okay to use the photo. The name that kept coming up in searches was “Misir Tarlasi.”

I searched around for that. Found someone on Facebook, and messaged them to see if he or she was the photographer. Tracked down a bunch of leads on Google searches, etc., for various places overseas, most of which were in a foreign language, so I could see these people were working hard for their crops but not exactly which of them was Mr./Ms. Tarlasi.

After several weeks, I finally came up with the information I was looking for. Misir Tarlasi? It means “corn field” in Turkish.

So, thank you, unnamed photographer whose picture graces my page. It is indeed a lovely view, one repeated for miles across the great American Midwest, our very own misir tarlasi.

I “steal” pictures off the web to illustrate stories on my blog almost every day. If anyone ever objected, and no one has so far, I’d pull the offending images down immediately. You’re the legal eagle, but my attitude is, since my blog is completely non-commercial and read by only a handful of people on any given day, it’s fair use to upload those pictures.

This is hilarious! I actually lived in Turkey for 4 years and recognized the phrase misir tarlasi as soon as I read it. There’s a much much looser interpretation of copyright laws among the Turks. Ok, there’s actually no care for copyright laws among most Turks. I guess I’ll join in with the Turks since I snagged the picture of the Cadbury Egg on my site today.